The disappearing face of melodrama

Once a staple of the American West, this pop-culture oddity is now a damsel in distress

Images from the Iron Springs Chateau melodrama and the surrounding area. Photos by Karl Gehring and John Moore of the Denver Post, and courtesy Iron Springs.

In 1999, a dump truck slipped out of gear and crash-landed in the Iron Springs Chateau's main theater.

MANITOU SPRINGS — After centuries of swashbuckling ribaldry, the art of melodrama is facing the possibility of a very unmelodramatic finale: tied to the railroad tracks like a damsel in distress, waiting for a hero who might not arrive in time to save the day.

As endings go: Boo.

"If the good guy does not triumph, and evil is not put down at the end, then it is not, by definition, a melodrama," said Vicki Kelly, one of three longtime owners of the Iron Springs Chateau, a historic dinner theater nestled above this tiny mountain town west of Colorado Springs.

It's a modern-day tragedy.

This timeless yet increasingly out-of-step piece of old-fashioned Americana is up against a villain far more insidious than a rotund, bellicose man who twirls his mustache. The clear and present evils in melodrama's long and colorful history are a down-spiraling economy. Changing tastes. Home entertainment. 3-D movies. Audience gentrification.

Back then, there were five other melodrama dinner theaters in the Pikes Peak area alone; all are now extinct. Back then, Iron Springs was pulling in about 40,000 people a year from April through September. Last summer, it was closer to 15,000, nearly 80 percent from out of town. They have to be when the town's own population doesn't crack 5,000.

"Back then, it seemed like if you came to Colorado, you were going to see at least one melodrama," Littrell said. "It was just part of Colorado."

Iron Springs is celebrating its 50th continuous year in business, making it Colorado's oldest for-profit theater company. But it faces its future with trepidation.

"It's sad," says young Tony Archer, who plays this summer's suave hero, Sheffield Silver, "because it is a dying art."

Statewide, melodrama is largely confined to Manitou Springs, with infrequent offerings at the Heritage Square Music Hall in Golden and Butte Opera House in Cripple Creek. Both of them have expanded their programming to incorporate more contemporary kinds of musical theater.

Cynthia Baer, left, and Daisya Dowen have some fun with a volunteer from the audience at a recent performance of the Iron Springs Chateau melodrama.
(Karl Gehring, The Denver Post
)

That's one concession Iron Springs will never make.

Its 2010 melodrama is called "Yo Ho Ho and a Barrel of Fun," but it's been anything but that since 1999 New Year's Eve, when an idling dump truck slipped out of gear, gained speed and flew over a retaining wall, crash-landing into the upstairs theater.

It was just the start of a remarkable series of calamities that would have done in anyone less steely than Vicki Kelly and her two partners.

After that there was the Williams Canyon flood, which broke sewer lines and got the drinking water condemned. The Hayman fire. The 9/11 attacks. The war. The economic crash.

"But other than that, the past 10 years have been great," Kelly said with an exasperated laugh. Her determination to sally onward is as quintessential a feature of the Old West as melodrama itself.

Littrell and the Kellys, all 58, were melodrama actors in Wichita in the mid-1970s. Littrell says they all visited Manitou once a year just to see what was new.

"Oh be honest — we came here to steal material," Vicki Kelly interjected. "We would come out with little notebooks and write down any good jokes we heard and take them back to Wichita with us."

Littrell and Bob Kelly joined the Iron Springs acting company in 1975; Vicki a year later. In '78, they bought it for $330,000.

A look back down at the town of Manitou Springs from the Iron Springs Chateau. (John Moore, The Denver Post)

They're the last ones standing from that era, Vicki says, "because we've been very careful; we watch our budget like a hawk; we pay ourselves very little; and we do a lot of the work ourselves."

No kidding. Vicki designs the hair, costumes and choreography; she writes some of the shows (to keep costs down) and runs the dinner operation. Bob directs shows and operates the spotlight. Littrell is the musical director, piano player, host and company comptroller.

And to think: When a friend first told Vicki about jobs in melodrama, she had to ask what it was. Her friend said, "Remember Snidely Whiplash from 'The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show'?" "I said, 'You mean the guy with the big mustache?' She said, 'Yep, that's melodrama.' "

The now uniquely American art form Iron Springs purveys is actually rooted in the 16th-century Italian tradition of commedia dell'arte — comedies with stock characters, exaggerated acting, skeletal plots — and morals that are spelled out in their subtitles. These implausible tales, with their necessarily happy endings, first spread through America on Mississippi River gambling boats. Nomadic troupes then took them to Western mining camps, where their broad acting styles more than made up for the many language barriers.

"You didn't have to be particularly well-read to follow a plot," said Littrell.

The advent of silent films and TV sparked a resurgence in the popularity of melodramas that lasted for most of the 20th century, each passing year further establishing it as a now uniquely American and unchanging art form.

"Melodrama is the Shakespeare of the American West," Littrell said. "For many people, the stories and the good, clean fun, never grow old."

People like Dennis Shaw of Colorado Springs, who has attended 20 of Iron Springs' past 21 annual melodramas. He recently brought along several fellow members of the local Knights of Columbus to see "Yo Ho Ho and a Barrel of Fun" — or, as this subtitle goes, "Don't Leach on Me." Turns out Roger Claman, the actor playing our villain — Lord Lucifer Leech — is himself a former Grand Knight. Will he be tough this night on his fellow Knight? "We try to be!" Shaw enthuses.

The interaction between audience and actors is what Shaw most loves about melodrama. It's what makes this not a passive amusement like watching a movie. And here, it's the stuff of legends. Like the guy they busted with 12 clinking coffee mugs stashed in his coat. Or the pastor from Denver (nicknamed "Dusty Roads") who came down year after year always asking to have his toupee yanked off during the show.

The audience is primarily retirees, seniors and church groups. Regulars like Shaw come back up to 10 times a year. Younger adults? "Not so much," Littrell admits.

A walk through the rustic Iron Springs Chateau, first built in 1880 as an open-air health resort, is a walk through time. It's named after the mineral-rich water that once bubbled like soda from the present-day dining hall. Scores of majestic mounted elk heads line the walls, along with photos and newspaper clippings. Above the 240-seat theater upstairs is an attic that serves as the actors' dressing rooms.

There's not a single computer in this building. All reservations are recorded by hand on a clipboard. Of the more than 100 theater companies in Colorado, this is the only one without its own website.

The evening begins with an affordable fried-chicken dinner served in family bowls along with green beans, potatoes, coleslaw and dessert. The show begins with a robust singalong of "Harvest Moon," led by Littrell tickling a 1913 Packard piano.

The audience is coached (as if they need it) on the fine art of ooohing the hero and awing the heroine: Lady Patience Purity. In tonight's Victorian tale, our hero Sheffield and his pirate mum, Monsoon Mary, will rescue his lady love (and her treasure map) from the evil clutches of a hook-handed heinous hellion who, when heckled, retorts, "Lady, do I come down to McDonald's and bother you while you're working?"

What's that? Did Lucifer just notice a camera flash? That's a capital crime at most theaters. Here, it's encouraged. "Photo op!" Claman yells, leading to an amusing succession of gratuitous poses.

The night is capped by a vaudeville-style "olio," including classic comedy like "Camp Granada," a 4-minute rendition of "Wizard of Oz" and more singalongs like "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Everyone leaves happy. Until you notice how little time it took for the room to empty.

Relaxing afterward, the actors say this job allows them a chance to satisfy artistic ambitions while living real lives. Two are students, one delivers motor parts and the other is a valet parker — like most working actors.

"Some people say, 'Oh, melodrama isn't real theater,' but it is a stylized form of acting that is as legitimate as any other," said Claman, who has a master's degree in theater.

Linda Ingram, who acted at Iron Springs more than two decades ago, says it's a type of acting "that's a lot harder than people realize."

Even harder these days. When Ingram worked here in 1983-84, the cast size was eight. In an economic concession, it's now down to four, each making about $12 an hour.

Opinions vary widely here on whether melodrama, or the Chateau, will survive another 10 years. "We'll just stick with it," Vicki Kelly says, "because we can't afford to close."

If the economy gets better, Littrell believes, the pendulum will swing back again.

"This is one of those classic good versus evil stories that have been around for centuries," he said.

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